Iovine is currently doing a publicity blitz in England, where he told the London Evening Standard that Apple's response to Swift's letter was a little more laidback than you might think. Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president of software and services, called Iovine on the Sunday morning Swift posted her letter to Tumblr.

"He called me and said, This is a drag," Iovine told the British publication. "I was like, Yeah, maybe there's some stuff she doesn't understand."

Iovine called Scott Borchetta, the boss of Swift's record label, Big Machine, then conferenced with Cue and Apple CEO Tim Cook. The trio decided to reverse its stance on paying artists royalties per stream during Apple Music's free three-month trial, and that was the end of it.

On Apple Music and algorithms

Iovine has long trumpeted human curation over algorithms when it comes to streaming services. Curation was the secret sauce in Beats Music, which never racked up many subscribers (a few hundred thousand compared to Apple Music's 11 million), but clearly won over Cupertino execs.

"Music deserves elegance and the distribution right now is not great," Iovine told the Evening Standard. "It's all over the place and there are a bunch of utilities. That's the best you can find. It's basically a really narrow, small, inelegant way to have music delivered. So it's sterile, programmed by algorithms and numbing."

Of course, Apple Music relies on algorithms to some extent, but the company employs hundreds of editors to curate the playlists it recommends to you based on your likes and iTunes purchases.

While everyone is busy comparing Apple Music's subscriber numbers to Spotify's or wondering whether Tidal owner Jay Z will make his music (and his musical partners' new work) exclusive to his struggling service, Iovine is focused on the bigger picture.

"I know Jay, he's a fabulous cat, but I'm not involved in his streaming service," Iovine said. "I don't look at Spotify or Rdio or any of these guys as a direct competitor, I look at other forms of entertainment as the competitor."

Those other forms of entertainment could include television, which Iovine had some surprising thoughts on in another interview with Wired UK.

"We all know one thing, we all have different television delivery systems, don't we all wish that the delivery systems were better, as far as curation and service?" he told the British magazine. "They're all technically good. And Netflix is starting to cross the code because they're starting to make some original content."